


The Green Sickness

by ChocoChipBiscuit



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3
Genre: F/F, Medical Conditions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-20
Updated: 2016-05-20
Packaged: 2018-06-09 14:18:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6910648
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChocoChipBiscuit/pseuds/ChocoChipBiscuit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sydney feeds Bittercup's hollow spaces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Green Sickness

She’s love-sick, but she’s not in love. Unless you call falling out of love a sickness in its own right, her mouth washed bitter with broken promises and bones etched thick with fatigue. Bittercup’s tired-- tired of life, of living. Best part of her days are the nights, the moon casting silver on the Wasteland.

Red says she’s ‘deficient,’ like that’s any call to be cruel. Gives her a brown bottle of little white tablets, but they taste funny and make her stomach cramp. Rattle down her throat, sit heavy in her gut. Bittercup stops taking them after three days, drops them on the desk at Red’s clinic and walks away.

(Sometimes, though-- Bittercup craves the taste of cool earth, of buried minerals and clay to coat her tongue. Takes pinches of the chalk she uses for face-powder, swallows it down and tries not to think about the emptiness.)

Everything’s lost color, the sun bleaching the sky dry and the nights painted black and white. Her own skin ghost-thin and translucent, fading.

Until Sydney comes.

Sydney’s a mercenary, a treasure-hunter and relic-seeker. Her words rustle like old history and she moves like legend. Talks about fragile texts and prewar artifacts-- knows their stories, their meaning, but also knows their value as caps in the hand, buying her life off the worth of the dead. She rattles a bag of food-- fresh mutfruit, small brown potatoes, a withered apple, battered cans-- and trades with Red for ammo and medical supplies.

When Bittercup stares at a dented tin of tomatoes, the yellow wrapper peeling down from the edge in a narrow strip, Sydney tucks her chin and smiles, tilts her head to the side. The sun catches gold in her dark eyes, warms her flushed cheeks.

“That one’s priced in time, not caps. Take a walk with me?”

Bittercup takes the can, hides it in her stash and runs back. Spends the night walking around the outlying buildings with Sydney. Dirt crunching beneath their boots, the breeze cool and dry. Carries the scent of distant scrub and asphalt.

Bittercup talks. Sydney listens.

Bittercup pours herself empty, a vessel of stars and hollow spaces. Voice soft and desperate, breath rasping thin. A hunger she cannot feed, the words sticking to her teeth without sustenance.

Sydney kisses her goodbye in the morning, cool lips to Bittercup’s cheek. Dry as deep earth, smelling of salt and unfamiliar roads. She makes no promises, no false hopes to crumble to ash and grit.

Bittercup waits until that evening to open her canned tomatoes, carefully prying the sharp-edged lid free and peeling it off. Licks it clean, watery acid tingling her tongue as she shies away from the cutting edge. Picks at a tomato with a bent fork, fighting the urge to gulp it down whole. Tastes tinny-sweet, metal and mush, but satisfies some deep craving, some empty place that whispers fulfillment in her gut.

She drinks the stewed juices after, rinses with purified water and drinks that too. The can’s stained copper on the inside, shines bright as sunshine. If she drinks enough of it, maybe it will bloom her veins with color.

. . .

Kimba scavenges old seed packets from an abandoned nursery, and Red organizes a garden plot. Pitches weathered stakes in the ground, more authentic claim to the land than the ramshackle prewar houses they’ve made their own.

Bittercup takes a shift in the garden like everyone else, with a fraying straw hat pulled snug over her head, the free ends prickling her scalp. Keeps the sun off her neck as she buries her hands in the loose dirt. Still wants to steal pinches of earth, wonders if it tastes as magical as the thought that they’re pulling life from the dry soil, that after all this death anything can still grow.

(Bury her deep-- see if she blossoms in the spring, if her canned tomatoes hold enough sunshine to let her last the sunless months. The seasons cycle without meaning in the Wasteland, and Bittercup counts change in the phases of the moon. Perhaps this will let her find rhythm with the earth’s pull.)

Sydney returns after two full moons, bearing comics and an iron fish. She trades the comics for 10mm rounds, but gives the fish to Bittercup.

“It’s good luck,” Sydney says, touching Bittercup’s ear, her cheek, the softness beneath her chin where it’s bare and unchalked, no lingering cosmetic powder. “Boil it in water and cook with it. The luck will rub off.”

“Then I’m just eating your luck.” Bittercup laughs like a crunch of bone. Like she can suck the sweet marrow and stain her lips.

Sydney smiles, shakes her head. Strand of hair falling over one eye, a shadow-cut of motion. “Nah, I’m giving it to you. Just for you. No walks required.”

They walk anyway-- take over the night watch from Dusty.

This time, Sydney talks. Bittercup listens.

(Bittercup had coaxed, pleaded. Wanted a reminder that there’s a life and a world out there besides slowly dying in a town full of the same people she’s always lived with. Wanted to know there’s still strange new horizons and untravelled paths, unmarked graves and quiet places that she can fill with her own heartbeat. That somewhere there is an open ocean and saline breeze, more life and water than she’s ever seen.)

Sydney talks about the fires crackling outside Underworld, the massive skeleton miraculously intact, a dead thing posed in semblance of life. She talks about the groan of metal aboard Rivet City, the constant smell of damp and murk, the sparkling waters outside Jefferson Memorial and the reclaimed library stacked with towering shelves that warp one’s sense of time, hours immersed in the books passing like minutes and emerging to a new-blinked night.

Sydney talks about her work, the rip of her submachine gun against tides of raiders, her arsenal of tricks in building choke points and planting mines, ways to hold her ground and take a stand. Talks about her dad.

(And Bittercup aches-- does not know ‘father’ or ‘mother’ but knows the smell of milk and flesh, a warmth that outgrew her. Exiled, like all the others. Adults always say goodbye, can’t be trusted. But Bittercup’s a mungo, Sydney’s a mungo, they can’t trust each other or themselves.)

Sydney says her nickname was ‘Little Moonbeam’ but that’s a lie, the biggest of all. The moon strips everything to black and silver, but she bleeds it back to color. Blossoms peach and pink, her brown eyes warm and her callused thumb trailing soft over the dips and knuckles of Bittercup’s hand.

It’s a lie that Bittercup can forgive.


End file.
